Gathering in a Good Way with Sydney Wreaks: Honouring Relationships through Shared Medicine and Care

Presented by Land Connects Us and Sydney Wreaks, these garden boxes are meant to support harvesting from local gardens, as well as a way to transform our relationship with difficult sites of colonial history, through community gathering and land stewardship.

You can find this garden located on the Kjipuktuk/Halifax Waterfront at Bishop’s Landing’s nearby Helipad (near the drunken lamp posts). The garden boxes will remain here until Nocturne’s annual Art-at-Night Festival from October 16-19, 2025, at which time the plants will be harvested for use within traditional medicines and cuisine.

These garden boxes are part of We all meet at food, a partner-developed initiative includes the growth and harvesting of a local garden, accompanied by a series of free public workshops by Nova Scotia-based artists whose practices are centred on local food, agriculture and sustainability practices.

Workshops will be aligned to Nocturne’s 2025 theme Ground, selected by curator Marite Kuus: “Gardeners, mycologists, walkers, archeologists and geologists, road workers, settlers; we all have a different relationship with this space which we interact with daily, and applicants are encouraged to consider the multitude of possible meanings of this theme.”

This garden is focused on nourishing through medicines, herbs and food. Two featured plants are the Apios Americana (American Groundnut) a small tuber, with a mild sweet taste. You can enjoy them in similar ways to a potato, or grind them into a flour. You will also find Wild Woodland Strawberries; The Heart Berry. An othering of interconnectedness, and community gathering. Both are celebrations of our relationship to the land, as well as Indigenous culinary traditions.

This project was created in partnership with Land Connects Us (an initiative of Planting the Seeds of Cultural Continuity, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and led by Dr. Joshua Schwab-Cartas). Special thank you to Build Nova Scotia for hosting the garden.

Photos by Michelle Cohen and Signy Holm.